July 30, 2012

Yet another installment in the acclaimed Stereo Action series by RCA Victor, this 1961 album by Leo Addeo is also yet another adventure into Polynesian territory, building upon the themes of Hawaii and the South Pacific that were so popular during the time period. And Hawaiian it indeed is--this album contains more than enough ukulele, lap steel, and exotic "imagery" to be classified alongside Les Baxter and Martin Denny.

When I sat down and listened to this, my expectations were moderately high, being pretty familiar with RCA Victor, Stereo Action and mid-century Exotica. Really though, after the album's run time was over, I realized that none of the songs on it were distinctive enough to tell apart. The music that makes up Paradise Regained is, in short, kind of bland--it's not exciting enough melodically and it's a bit too mellow and lackadaisical for its own good. It ends up coming across much like many of the generic faux-Polynesian LP's on the catalogs of '60s budget labels, except with a noticeably higher standard of production. Also, having payed close attention to the stereo mix on this record, it's not up to par with many of the other entries in the Stereo Action series. Technically, even by today's mixing standards, the channel separation would be fairly modest. Addin to that the outrageousness of mixing that Stereo Action is generally known for and it becomes a little disappointing.

That aside, this music is pleasing to the ears and, at least superficially, capable in its exoticism. It's definitely in line with the values of the music industry during its epoch. It's also, without a doubt, in line with the values of the listeners of the time. However, when I compare this album to others like it, I can't help but point out its relative mediocrity. Anyway, see what you think by hearing it for yourself below.

July 27, 2012

Watch Odd Future+Trash Talk playing "Radicals" and "Awake" live at 285 Kent on July 26, 2012. Even though they do have a new and pretty wicked industrial sized A/C at the warehouse on Kent, condensation started dripping from the ceiling 2 minutes into Trash Talk's set. Bodies were flying all over the place, swinging from the sprinkler pipes on the ceiling and vanishing in a several hundred people strong mosh pit. It was sheer mayhem and the ruckus was definitely brought to Brooklyn last night. Musically, it wasn't all that. But hey, what does a room full of explosive energy care about song writing finesse.

Massive thanks to my good friend Wendy Vogel for alerting me to this. I've seen bits and pieces here and there of German industrial stalwarts 1986 film Halber Mensch here and there, but now some wonderful soul has uploaded the complete package. Tons of great performance footage and surreally unsettling quasi-music videos spread throughout of Blixa and company in their prime.

On a related note, the film's director, Gakuryū Ishii, had perviously directed this film, entitled The Crazy Family, that I wish to make a point of seeing immediately:

"In 1984, Ishii directed his most widely-acclaimed movie to that point, The Crazy Family (逆噴射家族), the title of which literally translates to The Back-Firing Family (or more crudely, "the fucked-up family"). A savage satire of Japanese family life, it depicted an average household (mother, father, son, daughter, and later grandfather) moving into a new Tokyo home, only to have their perfect life collapse due to pressures from within and without. The daughter obsesses over her singing career; the nominally-demure wife does table-dances for the guests; the son stabs himself to stay awake during his exam-cram sessions; the father digs a giant hole in the living room floor, finds termites, buys ant poison and tries to kill everyone en masse. The film garnered the Grand Prix at the Saruso Film Festival." (from Wikipedia)

And back to Neubauten, here's a 1981 performance of the title track from their incomparable, underrated true first full-length album (not counting some early cassette works) Kollaps:

July 25, 2012

Today, there are more mp3s in circulation than all other recording formats combined. This alone would be cause to write a book about them, but I became fascinated with mp3s because of how they are made. An mp3 encoder uses a mathematical model of the gaps and absences in human hearing to remove some of the data in an audio file, in order to make it smaller. If the encoder “thinks” you won’t hear part of a sound recording, it yanks it out on the encoding end, so that the resulting mp3 file is smaller, and therefore easier to transmit over data lines or to stockpile on hard drives and flash memories.

I wanted to know where this model of human hearing came from and what it could tell us about our contemporary sonic culture. The result is my new book, MP3:The Meaning of a Format.

The technology behind the mp3 is called “perceptual coding,” and I quickly discovered it has deep connections to the development of hearing science and telecommunications over the last hundred years. Everything we think we know about hearing in the state of nature is a result of the interactions between ears and media in the 20th century.

MP3s also point to the importance of compression in the development of communication technologies. Each generation of new media is usually sold to consumers as being of higher definition and greater verisimilitude than its predecessor (think of how DVDs and Blu-Ray have been marketed, for instance). But developments in compression and lower-definition transmission are equally important for everything from telegraphs, to telephones, to color television, to satellite transmission to the internet. This other history is less apparent because it is manifest inside our hard drives, and inside the massive infrastructures that allow us to move data around. It is not as shiny or sexy as the latest consumer gadget, but it could well be more important for everything from aesthetics to policy.

Yep, it's time for another dispatch about the Silver Bridge disaster. I really never intended to do four of these, but somehow I keep finding additional 45s about this terrible event, and I'm contractually obligated to share 'em all with you, so here we go again. Incidentally, parts 1, 2 and 3 can be found at the linked numbers in this sentence.

In case you're new to this tragic story, the Silver Bridge spanned the Ohio River between Kanuaga, Ohio and Point Pleasant, West Virginia from 1928 until December 15, 1967 when it collapsed and fell into the icy waters below. The catastrophe, which happened during the busy afternoon rush hour, cost 46 people their lives.

The tragedy was the inspiration for a number of topical records; I'm up to nine at this point and I have a feeling that the well's pretty close to dry at this point. The disc we're focused on today comes from the REM label, a Lexington, Kentucky outfit that took its name from the initials of owner Robert E. Mooney, who also produced this piece.

July 22, 2012

In connection with my little hoarding problem, I also have a bookstore problem. My New Year’s Resolution this year was to stay out of bookstores, and I have done so, unless you count Posman Books in Grand Central Terminal that I have pretty much stayed out of, except for drifting in … oh, not very many times at all. Hardly ever! And also, I haven’t bought any books there, except for a couple. But not really! Mostly, I just go in to look at the latest issue of The Believer to see whether there are any more articles by WFMU DJ Dave Mandl about WFMU DJ Kenny G., and so far there have not been.

Posman Books does not have a terribly large selection of magazines anyway, not as large as any of the actual newsstands in Grand Central, so I’ve sort of lost track of What’s Going On In Magazines Today. Having been a magazine editor for a number of years, I still have a sad, schadenfreudish interest in the genre. So that’s why, when I got caught in the rain last Thursday down by Battery Park, I felt that it was all right for me to go into the big Barnes & Noble there to, you know, get a cup of coffee and look at some magazines; it was purely for research purposes, it wasn’t about buying books. Not at all.

Once inside, I got the very worst iced caffe latte I’ve ever had anywhereand began my investigation. Barnes & Noble has several shelves of magazines: How can there still be so many titles? Niche marketing, apparently. For instance, Glutes. Yes, Glutes, a “women’s fitness magazine” about making your butt look good. It turns out it’s not even a new magazine; Glutes has been around for years, apparently with the same headline on every cover, just changing the punctuation: “Your Best Butt Ever!” vs. “Your Best Butt … Ever.” Your best butt? Whatever. Check out Pole2Pole.

Okay, a magazine called Pole2Pole is about, what? Amundson, Scott, Shackleton …? No, it is a magazine about “the sport of pole fitness.” Pole fitness. Back in my day, it was just a sleazy way to supplement my college scholarship, but now it’s a sport. In fact, it is so very sportsy that there are several other magazines also devoted to pole fitness, such as Pole Spin and—my favorite—Vertical. And those are just the actual print periodicals; there are several other titles online.

A few years ago, I got a promotional copy of Garden and Gun, which I thought was pretty awesome: It’s like Martha Stewart with a Mossberg. It’s won a number of magazine-industry awards, and sells tons of advertising, but now I realize it is just the older, more aspirational cousin of Gun Girl and a slew of magazines featuring photos of women in bikinis holding assault rifles.

So the good news is, Print isn’t dead! It’s just turning into a Hooters franchise.

Somewhere in my collecting travels, this reel came into my collection. On it, the recipient of (what I'm sure were) countless audio letters from her sweetheart, collected four of them, splicing what were originally three inch reels back to back onto a seven inch reel.

The sender, as the tapes makes clear, was at the time a soldier stationed in Thailand. The month was June, and the days of the week mentioned (i.e. Saturday, June 19th) would indicate that the year was either 1965 or 1971 (assuming as I do that the tapes were made during the '60's or early '70's).

The tapes begin on June 7th, but most of that tape seems to have been lost over the years, so I've included the fragments (the first two minutes of side one and the last two minutes of side two) at the end of this post.

The meat of the audio here are three tapes from late June - on the 19th, the 25th and the 27th. The first tape is nice to hear, but to me doesn't contain as much of interest as do the other two tapes. In between the tapings on the 19th and 25th, the man speaking and a cohort took a lengthy trip to Bangkok, and the sites seen during that trip, and another shorter trip make up for the most interesting parts of the audio letters from the later in the month.

The tape from the 25th describes the drive, and the endless farm fields, as well as some particularly interesting temples. The tape from the 27th has my favorite moment, in which talks about a bike ride he took with another soldier, and how they were invited into one of the temples, at the virtual insistence of the monks, the reasons why, what happened once they were inside, and... well, you'll hear it, as well as his explanation for why he believes they acted in that way.

In between all that are descriptions of life on the base, discussions of the oppressive heat, random observations on other things, and many, many tender expressions of his love for the girl he is missing.

Finding recordings as like the one on this tape is among the biggest reasons I spend my free time delving into the contents of old reels, and I'm sure there are others out there who will enjoy this just as much. Here are the three main recordings, split up into the two sides as they originally would have been heard on the small reels:

July 21, 2012

Like its southern sister, reggae music, the folkways inherent in country music songcraft tend to hold onto and remold a good melody when they catch one. The song "Wild Side of Life", by William Warren and Arlie Carter is one of the most famous examples, using the basic 1 / 4 / 5 arrangement from the Carter Family's touching "I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes", which was itself inspired by elder tunes of course; and had already been riffed upon once since the Carters as "The Great Speckled Bird" (a now seemingly antique song on its own) by Roy Acuff. According to writer Bill Malone, the song's co-writer William Warren found inspiration for "Wild Side ... in his memories of a relationship with a younger woman, a 'honky-tonk angel, as it were, who found the glamour of the gay night life' too hard to resist". Hank Thompson's version of the song (recorded on December 11th, 1951, with his new producer Ken Nelson) was now his first charting single since 1949, living three and a half months atop the Billboard country chart in the spring and early summer of 1952. Hank Thompson / The Wild Side of Life

Pretty soon, down in southern Louisiana a record was cut by a young lady from Washington, Louisiana, name of Al Montgomery and prepped for release by author Jay Miller on his own Feature label. Through a quirk of fate, Montgomery never got a chance to break through with her version, as the song fell into the 'right hands at the right time' to make it the biggest thing ever.

These days, contemporary R&B seems to be a genre of music with specific attributes and qualities that are easily identifiable—things like slow grooves, smooth production values, and lush vocal arrangements. And, depending on the singer’s gender, the listener is treated to either a Diva or Lothario begging their beloved, earnestly trying to convince the apple of their eye that they need to consummate their love immediately.

While some of these elements can be found throughout the history of the genre, the scope of R&B used to be much larger, encompassing many different, and often disparate, musical styles.

Rhythm and Blues was initially a catchall term; coined after World War II, it was used to describe music made predominately for, and by, urban African-Americans. Under the Rhythm and Blues heading, different

July 20, 2012

Record labels (thankfully) continue digging through the vaults and reissuing old recordings on CD, usually remastered and very well-packaged. This album by the late, great Father Of Exotica is a very recent release (May 22, 2012) but remains faithful to the original LP issued on the Capitol label some five decades prior. It's also fully loaded with a great selection of bonus material (a good practice in the art and science … and economics … of CD reissues)

For those of you who haven't heard this album, it is, in some ways, very different than many of Baxter's other compositions. For one thing, this album stands out to me as being the most impressionistic (of the Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel persuasion) and classically-inspired effort I, myself, have ever heard by the man. Sure, it’s well-known that he was heavily influenced by modern classical composers (the Impressionists and Igor Stravinsky, most notably), but most of his work veered toward more jazzy arrangement and orchestration and was, more or less, still pop music. Jewels Of The Sea, on the other hand, oozes about as many distinctively classical qualities as popular music in the mid-20th century would have allowed, and possibly even then some. Don’t take that the wrong way, I don’t mean it as negative criticism. I've set aside enough time to play this entire CD on several different occasions and it still effectively quenches my hunger for Baxter, Exotica, and Space Age Bachelor Pad music alike. The fact that it’s a little more challenging just makes it all the more entertaining.

July 19, 2012

Loren Connors+Thurston Moore playing live at Spy Fest at The Stone in New York City on July 14, 2012. This had to be one of the most sweltering shows ever since that Erykah Badu basement outing a few years ago. If you look up "Melted Men" you'll most likely find portraits of people that attended this show.

After the break: American Hardcore dinosaurs 7 Seconds at House of Vans as well as a lot of noise and experimental mayhem...

July 18, 2012

From 1993 to 2003, Graham Lambkin was a member of one of the most complex, inspiring, and uncompromising groups in "rock history", The Shadow Ring. Eschewing popular notions of shuffling punk drums and fast guitars for sound art, spoken words, and wonderfully strange atmospheres, Lambkin and co. were able to carve a new path in musical experimentation. The world of the Shadow Ring, which moved from detuned guitars and simplistic percussion to beautiful keyboard pieces, has expanded within Lambkin's solo work. These records, particularly Salmon Run from 2007 and his most recent record, Amateur Doubles, are one of a kind experiences, wonderful albums that explore not only the sound and shape of music, but the act of listening to it as well.

You can contact Graham at hawkmoths(at)yahoo(dot)com. Graham also runs Kye Records, a fantastic label that can be further read about here: http://kyerecords.blogspot.com/ . I also recommend visiting his YouTube page- hawkmoths01, there are some embedded videos at the end of the interview. Check it out after the jump.

July 17, 2012

Not always, actually quite seldom, is the distinction between art and absurdity a relevant one. And it certainly doesn’t matter when in a TV show you combine live music, in-studio party, fancy dress, videotapes, punk, disco, anarchism, new wave, visual arts, rap, interviews, phone-in sessions, shaky camera angles, crude advertising and live drug taking. All this featuring guests such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Lurie, David Byrne, George Clinton, Fab Five Freddy, Tuxedo Moon, Debbie Harry, Maripol, Iggy Pop, Chris Burden, John Feckner just to name a few. The uniqueness of TV Party, however, was not as a celebration of the apotheosis of the underground, but that this played out on the mass media it rebelled against.

On air for one hour every Tuesday night from 1978 to 1982, TV Party was a piece of DIY experimental broadcasting hosted and conceived by Glenn O’Brien. It pioneered an alternative use of the medium, breaking its rules by looking deliberately amateur and shattering the traditional distinction between the

July 13, 2012

I almost want to get into a whole rant bemoaning the distressing lack of any perverse "theatricality" in most underground music these days, or the abysmally scant amount of genuine creepiness coming from whatever passes itself off as goth at this point, but man, it must be said that they really don't make 'em like the Virgin Prunes anymore. Aside from their ingeniously flamboyant and unsettling nightmare of a live show, the band, especially in the early days, had a great post-industrial undercurrent seeping through their sonics (their Herese release is especially representative of the band at their most chaotically perverse). Anyway, here's Gavin, Gigi, and the crew doing what they do best, all with a slyly campy, deadpan creepy cool. Still hard to believe they were old buds of U2, eh?

When crunk hit big a few years back, Atlanta was the central city representing all of the dirty south. But a lot of what Atlanta took to the mainstream had already been simmering throughout the south in the underground for years. Houston's DJ Screw and SUC have gotten a lot of well deserved credit lately. Not as much attention has been paid to Memphis bump, likely because it was so hard and violent. I won't claim to be an expert on this shit, but I have been listening pretty obsessively to everything I can get my hands on in the past month or two. Funny enough, the internet's best primer on Memphis bump comes from some weirdo on a pot-centric message board. But hands down, my favorite rapper representing Memphis bump is Tommy Wright III, who released a ton of tapes back in the day but never got picked up nationally when Three 6 Mafia blew up. Below is 1994's AMAZING AMAZING tape Runnin and Gunnin. Enjoy this one, because I definitely am, again and again.

I'm also pretty blown away by this video too - Tommy leads a Cribs style tour of his house that is super surreal because he doesn't seem to own any furnishings at all. Also highly recommended is this "interview", where Tommy and his crew The Manson Family are pretty much just acting wasted.

July 11, 2012

Kim Jong Un has a girlfriend! Or maybe a wife! Or maybe a girlfriend who is somebody else’s wife! No one at Thunk Tank Central (or anywhere else) is really sure. But last weekend he was seen in public with a young woman. Who was she?

Korea Joongang Daily says that South Korean intelligence has identified her as Hyon Song-wol, former lead singer for the Bochonbo Electronic Music Band. Hot gossip: KJU might have had an affair with her when he returned home from his Swiss boarding school. His father, Kim Jong Il, may have objected to the (still unconfirmed that it ever happened) relationship and separated the two. Song-wol might have married an army officer! She might have had a baby! But whose baby was it?

If, you know, there even was a baby. Or if the woman in the photos with Kim Jong Un isn’t just his sister, which it might be. Whatever! Here’s the video for Hyon Song-wol’s #1 super hit from 2005, Excellent Horse-Like Woman!

Being a true-blue union man, your Miner is off to fulfill his contractually mandated vacation time. Trust me, he'd rather remain in his underground perch, pickaxing his way through the cultural substrata on your behalf. (And besides, it's about 50 degrees cooler down there!) This will be the last Motherlode for a few weeks, so it'll be up to you to work out your own time-eviscerating activity. I hear you can poke around the Internet and find thing or two to do. Stay hydrated!

Chiemical Attraction"Eri rarely sang traditional Japanese themes, so the album reviewed here is a rarity. This was accompanied by the Tokyo Cuban Boys, who were obviously a big band that played Latino issues. Formed in 1949, was one of the first formations to introduce the mambo in the country of the rising sun. In the 70 concerts offered by different parts of the world as the USSR, Mexico and Cuba itself. The band dissolved in 1980. This big band serves as a support group for showcasing Eri and gives brilliant luster to compositions." (Google Translate version of description by Roberto, at Jenny Is in a Bad Mood)

Carter Stanley (1927 - 1966), along with his brother Ralph, who is still performing, was an essential part of one of the most celebrated bluegrass outfits of all time, the Stanley Brothers. The brothers got their start and began playing together professionally around their hometown of McClure, Virginia after returning from their military service in World War II. With Carter on banjo and his younger brother Ralph manning the guitar, they set about writing and singing traditional bluegass songs distinguished by the brothers' gloriously mournful harmonies.

Carter died in 1966 from a liver ailment and his contributions to the bluegrass world were memorialized on this tribute 45 released on the Fortune label out of Detroit. Despite the fact that Fortune is probably better known for their rhthym and blues, soul and vocal groups sounds, the label frequently hosted hillbilly recording session as well.